Talk: John Cade – Finding Sanity

Our speaker, Greg de Moore will be telling us about John Cade: The Australian veteran who revolutionised mental health treatment. In an age where the standard treatment for psychosis was electroconvulsive therapy, John Cade developed a revolutionary treatment.

John had been a prisoner of war in Changi. During the post-war years he worked at an asylum for veterans with mental illness. His experiences in Changi suggested to him that the origin of some psychiatric disorders might lie within the body, in the presence or absence of something in the brain’s chemistry. This was a radical idea at the time.

John began to treat a particularly manic patient by giving him doses of lithium (a simple mineral salt, dug from the ground) and the patient’s sanity was soon restored. This was a profound breakthrough.